Populism is seeing a global resurgence. Much of the difference of modern populism is due to social media which allows for direct connection with followers. This paper proposes that there is a new, connective, style of populism. The campaign of Kaohsiung City’s newly elected Mayor, Han Guo-yu, is taken as a case study. Han not only won in a landslide, but also had coat-tails for party candidates even in other cities where he was not on the ballot. Some journalists have termed this island-wide wave as “Han Tide”. Han’s campaign activities mainly started online. His success online is as much due to his message as to his tech-savvy campaign. This paper studies the Han Tide from the perspective of connective populism and employs information technology not only to uncover his technical strategies online, but also to decode the messages hidden in his posts, Facebook posts in particular.

Please click on the picture to your right for more information.